Hypnosis for Sleep and Insomnia

Understanding Sleep difficulties

The three faces of insomnia

• Insomnia at the start of the night:
  You go to bed tired, and as soon as the light goes out the brain switches on. The day replays on a loop, tomorrow's list writes itself, and an hour later you are more awake than you were at midday.
• Waking in the night:
  Falling asleep is fine, but at 3 or 4 in the morning your eyes open, and it is time for rumination, worries magnified by the dark, and the anxious calculation of how many hours of sleep are left.
• Early waking:
  The night ends at 5am, well before the alarm, with no chance of getting back to sleep and tiredness already booked for the day ahead.

These three forms, often mixed, most often share the same engine: a nervous system still on alert (accumulated stress, anxiety, hypervigilance…) that does not come down when the body lies down. That is why "trying to sleep" does not work: you cannot force yourself to let go.

A few figures

In France, 45% of people say they face at least one sleep disorder, and daytime sleepiness concerns one person in four, most often those aged 18 to 24. Read more

What Hypnosis offers for Sleep

How hypnosis acts on sleep

The hypnotic state is a close cousin of falling asleep: a natural state of altered consciousness, between waking and sleep, that you pass through every evening anyway. In session it becomes a training ground: your nervous system relearns the way down.

In practice, the support works on four levels:

• Settling the alert system.
  Deep hypnotic relaxation is not just a pleasant moment. It physiologically retrains the body to move from alert mode to rest mode: heart rate, breathing, muscular tension... That state is then anchored, which means made available at will, particularly at bedtime and during night waking.
• Switching off the mental hamster wheel.
  Bedtime rumination is not fought head on (trying not to think about something is thinking about it). Hypnotic work teaches the brain to let thoughts pass without grabbing them, and to give the day a "place to close" before bed. So that the bedroom stops being the midnight meeting room.
• Disarming the fear of not sleeping.
  This is the heart of the work for settled insomnia: separating the bed from the struggle, taking away bedtime's status as a pass-or-fail exam, and restoring the body's confidence in its own ability to sleep. An ability that never disappeared, only got interfered with.
• Making you self-sufficient through self-hypnosis.
  You learn a simple protocol to use on your own: settling the body comfortably, slowing and gently lengthening the out-breath, letting attention move down into the sensations of the body rather than into thoughts, then drifting towards an imagined place of calm in more and more detail. Used at bedtime or at 3am, it does not "force" sleep: it recreates the conditions in which sleep comes on its own.

What do the studies say?

Research on hypnosis and sleep is encouraging. Experimental work has notably observed that a suitable hypnotic suggestion could increase the proportion of deep slow-wave sleep, the most restorative phase, in receptive people, and hypnotherapy is among the non-drug approaches studied for insomnia, alongside cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I).

The studies are promising but still limited in volume, results vary from person to person, and hypnosis is meant to come alongside validated approaches and medical follow-up, never to replace them.

Hypnosis and sleeping pills: alongside, never a sudden stop

What hypnosis can do, and often does very well: support a gradual reduction decided and steered by your doctor, while rebuilding in parallel the natural sleep mechanisms that the treatment had put on hold. Many people reduce their dependency on sleeping pills that way, at their own pace and in the right order: the doctor decides the timetable, hypnosis helps along the way.

When to see a doctor first

Some sleep disorders have an organic cause that hypnosis does not treat. See a doctor as a priority in particular if:

• You snore heavily with pauses in your breathing or marked daytime sleepiness (suspected sleep apnoea, a serious health matter that is diagnosed and treated medically);
• Your legs are seized by irrepressible restlessness at bedtime (restless legs syndrome);
• Your insomnia comes with a collapsed mood, a loss of interest or dark thoughts. Insomnia is sometimes the first visible sign of depression, which calls for medical care;
• The difficulty appeared with a treatment or an illness.

Hypnosis can then help, alongside that follow-up, with the stress that goes with it.

And children's sleep?

Trouble falling asleep, evening fears, nightmares, frequent waking: sleep difficulties in children are common and respond very well to hypnosis, which with them takes the form of stories and imagination games. See a doctor if the difficulty is marked (particularly for night terrors and sleepwalking).

At Solutions Hypnose, our specialised practitioners support parents and children from the age of 4 or 5. See Hypnosis for Children.